Bergen-Belsen and the Hungarian Jews

Bergen-Belsen concentration
camp

The last group of Jews to be deported
by the Nazis were the Hungarians. Both Hungary and Bulgaria were
allies of Germany in World War II. On April 17, 1943, after Bulgaria
had refused to allow their Jews to be deported, Hitler met with
Admiral Nicholas Horthy, the Hungarian leader, in Salzburg and
tried to persuade him to allow the Jews of Hungary to be "resettled"
in Poland, according to Martin Gilbert in his book, "Never
Again." Admiral Horthy rejected Hitler's arguments and refused
to deport the Hungarian Jews.

In mid March 1944, Germany occupied Hungary,
and the deportation of the Jews began a few weeks later. The
first transport of Hungarian Jews to the Auschwitz death camp
was on April 29,1944, according to Yehuda Bauer (Freikauf von
Juden?), who wrote that mass transports of Hungarian Jews to
Auschwitz began on May 14, 1944.

The last mass transport of 14,491 Hungarian
Jews to Auschwitz was on July 9, 1944, according to Franciszek
Piper (Die Zahl der Opfer von Auschwitz), who wrote that most
of the Hungarian Jews were gassed immediately upon arrival.

On August 13, 1944, a small transport
of 131 Jews arrived from Hungary at Auschwitz and on August 18,
1944 the last transport of 152 Jews arrived. By that time, a
minimum of 437,685 Hungarian Jews had been transported to Auschwitz
on 148 trains, mostly the Jews living in the villages and smaller
towns.

Robert E. Conot wrote in his book "Justice
at Nuremberg" that 330,000 of the Hungarian Jews were sent
directly to the gas chambers. By 1944, the railroad tracks had
been extended into the Birkenau camp and the transport trains
stopped a few yards from the four gas chamber buildings. According
to the US Holocaust Museum, there were 200,000 Jews still living
in Budapest after these deportations.

On April 7, 1944, two Jews, Rudolf Vrba
and Alfred Wetzler, managed to escape from Birkenau, the infamous
Auschwitz II camp where the gas chambers were located. They made
their way back to Slovakia and wrote a report which soon reached
the hands of the Pope, the King of Sweden, and even President
Franklin D. Roosevelt. The neutral nations such as Sweden and
Switzerland began to issue passports that saved the lives of
thousands of Hungarian Jews, including Tom Lantos, who subsequently
emigrated to America and became a member of the U.S. House of
Representatives.

Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau,
Jr. and Judge Samuel I. Rosenman, a Jewish advisor to President
Roosevelt, urged him to intervene, according to Conot. Roosevelt
threatened that "Hungary's fate will not be like any other
civilized nation's...unless the deportations are stopped."
On July 2, American planes bombed Budapest and its railroad facilities,
according to Conot.

The Hungarian government and Admiral
Horthy were informed that Vrba and Wetzler had proof that the
Jews were being gassed at Auschwitz. Vrba, who worked at the
train platform, had counted the number of Jews who arrived at
Birkenau and were then never seen again. Vrba's estimate was
that 1,765,000 Jews had been gassed at Auschwitz-Birkenau by
March 1944, just before he made his escape.

After a meeting on June 26, 1944, the
Hungarian Council of Ministers decided to permit the emigration
of 7,800 Jews, most of whom had immigration papers for Palestine.
Others had protection documents issued by the Swedish government.
At this point, Horthy ordered the deportation of the Hungarian
Jews to stop and on July 17, 1944, the Hungarian government announced
that all Jews who had immigration papers for Palestine would
be given exit visas and allowed to leave.

After Hitler himself put pressure on
Horthy to deport the Budapest Jews to Auschwitz, the Hungarian
government decided to begin transporting the Budapest Jews on
August 25, 1944. According to Yehuda Bauer, the plan was to transport
the Jews on 6 trains with 20,000 Jews on each train; the first
train was scheduled to leave for Auschwitz on August 27, 1944.
However, the deportation plans were stopped when the Hungarian
government received a telegram from Reichsführer-SS Heinrich
Himmler on August 24th; Himmler ordered the preparations for
the deportation of the Budapest Jews to stop.

According to Eberhard Kolb, Reichsführer
Himmler had already opened a special section at the Bergen-Belsen
exchange camp on July 8, 1944, where 1683 Hungarian Jews from
Budapest were brought. The Jews in the Hungarian section were
treated better than all the others at Bergen-Belsen. They received
better food and medical care and were not required to work. They
wore their own clothes, but were required to wear a yellow Star
of David patch. The Bergen-Belsen camp had different categories
of prisoners, and the Hungarian Jews were in the category of
Preferential Jews (Vorzugsjuden) because they were considered
desirable for exchange purposes.

The first transport of 318 "exchange
Jews" left the Bergen-Belsen Hungarian camp on August 18,
1944, bound for Switzerland. On August 20th, the trainload of
Hungarian Jews arrived in Bregenz and then went on to St. Gallen
the next day.

Himmler, who was beginning to think of
himself as Hitler's successor, had begun working behind Hitler's
back in negotiating with the Jews. On August 21, 1944, three
SS officers (Kurt Becher, Max Grüson and Hermann Krumey)
who were representing Himmler, and a representative of the Budapest
Jews, Rudolf Kastner, met with Saly Mayer, a leading member of
the Jewish Community in Switzerland.

The meeting took place in the middle
of a bridge at St. Margarethen, on the border between Germany
and Switzerland, because Mayer refused to enter Germany and he
also did not want the SS men to enter Switzerland, according
to Yehuda Bauer. Becher asked for farm machinery and 10,000 trucks,
and in return, he promised to free 318 Hungarian Jews from Bergen-Belsen.
In a show of good faith, the train with the 318 Jews was already
waiting at the Swiss border. Mayer offered minerals and industry
goods instead of the trucks.

According to Yehuda Bauer, Becher later
claimed that he had persuaded Himmler not to deport the Budapest
Jews, and that was why Himmler issued an order to stop the deportation
three days later.

A second group of 1368 Hungarian Jews
left the Bergen-Belsen detention camp on December 4, 1944 and
entered Switzerland just after midnight on December 7th, according
to Yehuda Bauer. One of the Hungarian Jews in this group was
11-year-old Adam Heller, who survived and is now a Professor
in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of
Texas in Austin, TX.

Professor Heller described what it was
like in Bergen-Belsen: "I was emaciated, and during the
long roll calls I fainted twice of hunger. My hair and clothing
were full of lice, and the narrow three-storied bunks on which
we slept had bedbugs."

Altogether, there was a total of 2,896
Jews released for ransom, including a transport of 1210 Jews
from the Theresienstadt Ghetto who entered Switzerland on February
7, 1945.

After the departure of the second Hungarian
transport to Switzerland in December, more transports from Budapest
continued to arrive at Bergen-Belsen and the Hungarian section
remained in existence there until April 1945. According to Eberhard
Kolb, it was a transport of Hungarian Jews in February 1945 that
bought in the lice that started a typhus epidemic in the camp.
The delousing facilities in the camp had been temporarily out
of order at that time.

When Hitler learned that Himmler was
negotiating to ransom the Hungarian Jews he was so enraged that
he later expelled Himmler from the Nazi party. However, Hitler
had already given his permission in December 1942 to release
Jews for ransom, so Himmler was not going against established
Nazi policy.

After the Hungarian Jews had entered
Switzerland, there were false reports by the Swiss press that
the Jews were being ransomed in exchange for asylum for 200 SS
officers who were planning to defect. When Hitler heard this,
from Ernst Kaltenbrunner who was no friend of Himmler, he ordered
all further releases of Jews for ransom to stop. Nevertheless,
Himmler continued to release Jews from the concentration camps,
as he continued to negotiate with the Allies. For example, he
allowed a transport of prisoners to leave the Ravensbrück
women's camp in the last days of the war.

Between April 6 and April 11, the Hungarian
Jews were evacuated from Bergen-Belsen on the orders of Himmler
who was planning to use them as bargaining chips in his negotiations
with the Allies. The Jews in the Star Camp and also in the Neutrals
Camp were also evacuated, along with the Hungarians, in three
trains which held altogether about 7,000 Jews who were considered
"exchange Jews."

One of these trains arrived with 1712
people on April 21, 1945 in the Theresienstadt ghetto in Czechoslovakia.
Two weeks later the Theresienstadt Ghetto was turned over to
the Red Cross, just before Russian troops arrived. The other
two trains never made it to Theresienstadt because they had to
keep making detours due to frequent Allied air attacks, according
to Eberhard Kolb (Bergen-Belsen from 1943 to 1945).

One of the trains finally stopped on
April 14 near Magdeburg in northern Germany; the guards ran away
and the Jews on the train were liberated by the American troops.
The third train halted on April 23, 1945 near the village of
Tröbitz in the Niederlausitz region; they were liberated
by Russian troops after the guards escaped.